RV GOTHIC: Field Notes From the Wrong Life
The search for Bigfoot in a mobile prison
I am thinking of a new project. It may be a Substack series, a web series, or even a book. Whatever it becomes, it will definitely be the only way I stay sane while documenting the next strange chapter in a strange life.
Working title: RV GOTHIC: Field Notes From the Wrong Life.
For years, I have lived inside a life that looked, from the outside, pretty ordinary. Marriage. Family. House. Responsibilities. The usual set dressing.
But behind closed doors, it was shaped by absolute control: utter financial dependence, total lack of privacy, and the grinding horror of realizing that the person supposed to “love” and “protect” you doesn’t even view you as a person. Never allowed to have your own thoughts, grief, anger, longings, plans, or future. Never able to email, text, or journal without what you thought was private being thrown back in your face. No friends. Not even music. Nothing but motherhood and house-cleaning.
Oh. And the night that ended with hands around my throat, my eight-year-old son dialing 911, and my newborn daughter sleeping in the next room.
Now, absurdly, the next chapter may be stuffed into an RV.
Yup. I might be stuck in a metal, rolling hallway with the person who abused me for decades, and who is only now dawning on the realization that I am a human being. Because, for now, he still holds all the cards.
An RV is a domestic pressure cooker on wheels even in the best of scenarios.
As always, though, I have a tendency to shrug and make the “best scenario” out of the worst.
So imagine:
America, observed through campground hookups and gas station coffee. Deep woods. A dysfunctional family searching for Bigfoot signs. And probably finding no monsters stranger than the ones people bring with them.
It sounds funny because it is funny. And bleak because it is bleak.
That’s the territory I want to write from: where survival and absurdity share a cigarette outside the laundromat.
I don’t know yet exactly where this is headed. Maybe the RV will only be temporary shelter. Maybe it will be the bridge to something better. Maybe it will just be the wrong life in motion—which, I guess, is still better than the wrong life standing still.
But I know what I want to do with it: make field notes. I want to document the eerie comedy of domestic displacement, a late-stage bad marriage that limped on for far too long, roadside America, and the search for freedom in a vehicle that may not have enough storage space for one woman’s kids, dog, cat, luggage, and future hopes all at the same time.
I want to write about what it means to be trapped and still observant. To be afraid and still funny. To be furious and still making art. To be unhoused in today’s United States. To be in the wrong life and begin, sentence by sentence, to build the right one—with Virgil at my side.
There might be signs of Bigfoot.
There will be family ghosts.
There will be campgrounds, bad weather, tiny rituals, roadside signs, field notes from the edge of collapse, and whatever truth can be smuggled out in plain sight.
And if a long and horrible life insists on becoming gothic, ridiculous, claustrophobic, and American?
I reserve the right to take notes.
Stay tuned for: RV GOTHIC: Field Notes From the Wrong Life.